Posted
by
timothy
on Monday April 11, 2005 @03:27PM
from the eyestrain-city dept.

dealcatcher writes "For those blessed by the Apple gods and actually own two 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays, this guide explains how to hook two of them up to a PC. The guide includes which graphics cards will support this configuration and a step-by-step of how to get it all going."

The shittiest thing about Apple monitors if you don't use Apple computers is that they don't give you the option of using Applecare to extend the warranty of the monitor above the 1 year it comes with even if you want to pay extra. However if you buy an apple computer and get the applecare then the display is covered for free. If you are planning on doing this it almost makes sense to buy 2 minis with your display, get the applecare, and then chuck the minis on ebay for close to what you paid for them. S

AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac mini: [apple.com] The AppleCare Protection Plan covers your Mac, as well as an AirPort Extreme Card, an AirPort Express or AirPort Extreme Base Station, and Apple RAM purchased for your Mac. Mac mini, Power Mac, and PowerBook customers can also enroll one Apple display for coverage, provided the Mac and display are purchased together

So, it indeed looks like you can have one monitor attached per mini; but the coverage does travel with the mini, so you couldn't sell it (although how

The "rules" of AppleCare don't state that the monitor has to be able to work with the machine, just purchased at the same time. While it makes no sense, and Apple may re-word things in the future, the AppleCare agreement does indeed allow you to purchase a 30" display and cover it under the Mac Mini's AppleCare umbrella.You are in essence paying $650 for a warranty on your Cinema Display, but then again one repair would allow you to recoup the entire cost.

So far I've checked Samsung, Sony, ViewSonic, Dell, and Phillips and haven't found one yet that offers over a year standard... Dell, like apple, also only seams to allow you to add extra support if you are purchasing a computer.

On the plus side, youll be the envy of all the geeks on the block, aside from the crazy windows one that hates apple (despite having never tried one except for a quick second only to find it different than windows and therefore unacceptable).

1: buy two rather wonderfull but epensive monitors2: buy expensive graphics card with duel dvi conectors and a framebuffer to support massive displays such as these3: install graphics card(driver setup etc ) and then plug in new monitors ( if you buy one with conectors too close either, use an adaptor cable or slice up the one on your 3000 grand monitors... i know which i would do)4: turn on system and configure your windowing system to use both monitors at a comfertable size.... in other words do exactly the same thing you would do(read:Should do) normaly

So this would be the computer equivalent of putting Formula One racing slicks on a Yugo?

Actually, that wouldn't be as outlandish as you seem to be implying. Formula 1 banned slicks several years ago, mandating grooved tires. As a result, any Formula 1 slicks you might acquire for your Yugo would be used tires and, frankly, putting used tires on a Yugo is pretty much SOP;-)

Because they prefer to use Open Source compilers whereas other manufacturers use proprietary compilers like the Intel Compiler. Unfortunately, GCC is not very well optimized on the PPC and for some reason, the project refuses to incorporate PPC a lot of PPC specific optimizations despite the fact that it already contains a lot more X86 specific ones.

I suppose they could create artificial benchmarks using the IBM PPC Compiler but what would be the point? Almost none of the code compiled on the mac would ha

Multi-monitor support has been on macs before they were on windows, its MS that had to play catch up in the early 90's. Infact, when win95 came out, nobody was really bothered about it supporting up to 7 monitors because Apple had already done it. So you are right, its nothing new, it isn't a big fuss either except nobody else at the moment does 30" monitors like apple does. Hence the excitement.

Resolution. Editing two huge pics at once in Photoshop. Most new DSLRS put out pics in 8 MP resolution, and one of these could only show you 4 of those, and in the wrong aspect at that (DSLR usually shoots at 3:2, not 4:3). Not that I'd buy one; I savor the day I'm going up from 1280x960 on a 17" CRT... Shit, the other day I bought a cheap lens for my camera that cost more than this crappy monitor.

if you have the cash for two 30" monitors then im fairly sure you could find the deskspace.. Personaly my desk on which i sit right now is about 1.5M long and would have plenty of space for these to sit at the back(if i moved the clutter/ mess), It is a big desk but not much above average i would think.

Two 30" monitors are a pain, one tends to center their attention on one monitor and place things that are always open on the other.

The constant head turning and sometimes scooting your chair over to use the other monitor is just plain wasteful.

I've even tried placing one large monitor over the other, this seemed to help cut down on the scooting and head turning as I just can use my eyes to look up.

The work involved dragging windows up to the other monitor just isn't worth the effort.

Since any window can easily be minimized or using Expose in Mac OS X kind of makes getting a second 30" Display a total waste of money. I've been happier since I got rid of the other monitor. BTW I sit about 4 feet from the 30" to take it all in. Wireless keyboard is neccessary.

Yes, that's what I meant. For viewing images, photos, or film: great, obviously. My concern was with text apps. With two such large screens and their high resolution, you're either going to be doing a lot of leaning forward (& sideways) to read the screens, or you're going to be squinting like George Costanza when he's spotting pennies on the sidewalk.

Either way, it's not very healthy or productive. The point is that I think there's a limit to how large a desktop area can be, over that threshold it be

Two 30" monitors are a pain, one tends to center their attention on one monitor and place things that are always open on the other.

The constant head turning and sometimes scooting your chair over to use the other monitor is just plain wasteful.

I use two 19" CRTs at home and at work and while it's nice to have the extra screen area, it gets hard on the neck after a while. Using two 30" monitors must be very difficult unless the resolution is scaled down so you can sit far enough away (which kind of de

The issue is whether the second monitor is being used just as more space, as a separate space, or a combination of both. When I was using a 15" powerbook with 1024x768, I always used an external monitor as well if I could, because there just wasn't enough screen real estate.

Now I've got a powermac with a 23" screen, and I find that I don't miss the second screen all that much, except for in a few specific applications. Those applications are ones where the separate screens were a type of organization for m

Sounds like I need to come over as a consultant!Pop in a couple of silent fans charge him a few grand and be off.Of course they might not make custom fans for Macs, but I'd be willing to solder the connection to adapt it myself.

Have you ever seen how massive the G5 CPU/heatsink combo is and felt the amount of heat it puts out? They put anything AMD and intel make to shame when it comes to ridiculous head output. Those fans are the closest thing to silent you're going to find that can effectively cool those things.

The funny part is that he's right back to square one with the annoying fan noise. I know if I had the money to be able to afford such a system, I'd also spend the extra $$ for longer cables and/or enclosure for the case to eliminate the noise.

lol, yeah. My local computer store has an apple store in it. Whenever I go in I always take a few minutes to ogle the 2, 30" display steup they have to showcase the G5. I always sit there and say: "now if only I had 10grand to spend...":-P.

I'm a dual G5 owner, admittedly of the previous 2.0ghz dual processor model, and I happen to own a display card capable of driving the 30" display.

It may be capable of driving the 30" display, but is it doing so?

GPUs can put out a lot of heat (indeed, on my PowerBook the GPU on it is the biggest single source of heat, particularily if I'm playing a 3D game or anything really graphics intensive). When you're running them at extremely high resolutions, and running TWO of them, they're going to pump out h

You are correct. Tragically, all I can afford is the 23" previous generation Cinema Display I presently own:-(.

However, I've used Apple Motion on it, and a more brutal test of a graphics card has yet to be invented. I still haven't noticed much in the way of noise.

When I installed my Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDL card, which is this sprawling monster that takes over two slots, I noticed that you have a point. The fan ventilates into the case and so the case fans are still in charge of getting the air out.

Are there any drawbacks with my own proposed solution to run some long keyboard/monitor cables and put the computer in another room?

I wouldn't even bother with long keyboard or mouse cables -- Bluetooth has an effective range of 10m, which should be more than enough to put the machine on the other side of a wall. Then you only need to run a single monitor cable.

The only downside I can think of is needing to go around the corner to put a CD/DVD in the drive. This can be mitigated by using a Firewire or

I think most people would probably just use a DVI extension cable and get their USB and FireWire from elsewhere. Otherwise you'd need an extension to Apple's cable which would probably be pretty expensive.

Most of my peripherals are external hard drives which (obviously) don't need to be in the same room and in fact should be banished in this scenerio thanks to their own noise problems.

If you want a silent computer, you don't want to be in the same room as the optical drive, either:-).

I think most people would probably just use a DVI extension cable and get their USB and FireWire from elsewhere. Otherwise you'd need an extension to Apple's cable which would probably be pretty expensive.

Well, doesn't the PC side of the cable break out into seperate DVI, USB and Firewire plugs? If that is the case, you should be able to go from the Apple specific cable to a bundle of the three seperate cables for the rest of the run.

I have to admit, I just can't understand people who complain about computer noise. I have a damn loud computer- two 40mm drive cooler fans,an 80mm case fan, a 120mm case fan, two PSU fans, a CPU fan, and a fan on the graphics card. It bothered me at first, but after a couple of days I got used to it. For fuck's sake, just listen to music or watch TV or something.

And advice for the guy who wrote the article- the Quadro 4000 is just a Geforce 6800; there are fanless coolers for it if the deafening noise o

Why would anyone want to do this? Why not just get one 30" display, a G5 Tower (say, the $2k one), and a copy of Virtual PC w/ Windows XP Professional, and save about $250? After all, do you really need almost NINE HUNDRED square inches of screen? If you do, isn't it kind of a waste to have it displaying the much shoddier Windows graphics (or, shoddier still, I'm sorry to say, those of certain more politically acceptable free operating systems), blown up to offend the eye all the more? (Yes, let's have the

I was rather envious of his almost 900 square inches of screen... until i realized I'm reading this in my theater which is projecting nearly 3400 square inches... then i felt a little bit better about my self... but then i realized he had 8,192,000 pixels of screen while i have just shy of a million... any higher its just too damn hard to read.:-(

...steal the money you need to afford this equipment. And the week after we'll be demonstrating a series of exercises you can use to relieve the pain from repeatedly craning your neck to view the far corners of your displays.

So he's chucking a G5 because of fan noise... makes no sense. I've got a solution that you can apply to PC or Mac. I've been doing it for about six years now.

Buy four USB hubs and a really damn long monitor cable, and put the stupid machine in the closet. The closet of some other room, even. Or in the basement. Run the cables through a hole in the wall. The G5 even comes with Firewire 800 and optical audio jacks, both of which can support nice long cable lengths.

It's water cooled in the sense that heat is conducted from the CPU via fluid exchange, but even the majestic G5 is not a silent machine when running full-throttle. Put the machine in a closet and you don't even have to listen to DVDs spinning in the drive while you watch a movie.

Yeah, the basement is a bit far off... If you find yourself swapping media a lot you can always get a USB2.0 external DVD drive -- but that brings noise back into the equation (yeech). I don't know what the best solution for that is... buy two drives? Copy the DVD on beforehand so you only need to go downstairs once?

I've been around a number of G5 towers running 30" Cinema Displays, as I work at a retail store. The G5s only make any noise that is audible above a slight whisper when they are churning data really hard.... or are defective. It is not unheard of for a G5 to have a bad midplane. This guy aparently didn't have the sense to bring his $9000+ setup back to an Apple Store and have the Geniuses say "Yup... that's noisy" and fix it. That said... he is clearly not aware of the giant performance hit his "silent" PC is from his G5. Oh well. Feels like another under-appreciated waste of power.

Two is not the ideal monitor configuration. 3 identical monitors provide a much more balanced desktop. Who wants to look at a seam in the dead center of a desktop?

What I want to see, is a MAC running THREE 30 inch displays at full resolution. I've been trying to configure this for some time but have not found a real solution. Anyone know of a mac PCI card that can push a 30 at native resolution?

Well, the Matrox Parhelia DL256 seems to be the PCI dual-link DVI card of choice. However, I can't find a Mac driver. The good news is that there DOES seem to be a Linux driver, so maybe porting would work? (yeah, I know, an XFree86 driver ported to Aqua isn't the best idea, but we could possibly get specs if it's open source)

But in need of more desktop space, I've installed Desktop Manager, which allows me to use multiple virtual desktops (a la x-windows).I setup my extra mouse buttons to switch forward and backward between the virtual screens, which is very fast and very handy. (with the help of gamepad companion, which is not free).If you haven't tried free programs like Desktop Manager (or simular programs like Virtue), then I'd really recommend them to you. [macupdate.com]

That being said, my wife (Graphic Designer) has recently bought a dual G5 and its whisper quiet. The only time it gets noisy is if you accidentally tell it to boot from a network server that isn't there - this will scare the pants off most people, especially if they're not expecting it (like I

So, basically, you've just spent $6000 on monitors capable of displaying a level of clarity that Windows cannot, in even its greatest wet dreams, fully utilize... that is, unless this guy comes up with an equally-absurd, obscenely expensive, and Rube Goldbergian solution t

You're abusing (just like most others) the term 'silent'. There is nothing about the G5 that makes it near silent. Yes, it manages fan speeds. Yes, there are many fans and most of the time they run slowly. But no, that doesn't make it 'near-silent', just because you can get cheapo 7000rpm fans that sound insane. The G5 makes noise, you know it and I know it, and in quiet home environments it is often unacceptable. Just face it.

1. I have three G4s... the noise doesn't seem to "bother" me... and I'm the kind of guy who can hear my CRTs' 60-120Hz refresh cycles.

2. The guy complained the so-called fanless PC was noisy. For whatever reason, his solution was... well, personally I'd have told him to get a G4 laptop and be done with it. I do video editing on my G4 laptop... so don't tell me it's not sufficient.

Look, if you wanted to tell us all that you're jealous, just have the guts to say you're fucking jealous. I know I am